Sweden to shut bars and restaurants that ignore coronavirus restrictions

A recent study by the Public Health Agency of Sweden came to a similar conclusion.

[] in the non trivial sense, since obviously we'll all die; but presumably we won't all die from this pandemic.

1. We realize that the shutdown had a small effect, because a) the virus is already widespread due to easy transmission and b) the mortality rate is much lower than previously thought. Thus, we don't need to continue the shutdown.

2. The virus turns out to be as bad as feared, and things get much worse in Sweden (and elsewhere). The shutdown needs to continue indefinitely.

I'm leaning toward #1, but I think it's still too early to rule out #2. If we are living in the first scenario, I wonder how long it will take for the general public to realize that's the case.

I do think that a combination of political jockeying and mass hysteria have placed us into the position we're in now. If that's true, then the worst thing about this virus will certainly be the economic impact which has a number of far reaching effects.

Number of deaths so far is very high compared to the neighbouring countries, and there is still a long way to go before herd immunity.

In general, it seems to me quite insane that Sweden already in the beginning of March basically had decided to infect millions of people with a virus we only had a month of experience with or something like that.

https://studylib.net/coronavirus#country-se

their case count is steadily climbing, as is their CFR.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-mill...

The rolling 7 day average shows they're still on a bit of an up-tick.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...

However, if you normalize for start time they're not really doing any worse than a lot of other countries.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

Average time between infection and death from COVID-19 is 23 days, and 18 days average from first symptoms to deaths (1) A country can be a week or two into the overload level before it shows up in the ICUs

https://twitter.com/michaeljswalker/status/12454153391497052...

Here's another paper from a orofessor of mathematics at Stockholm University who has appeared in the media as a subject matter expert: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066050v...

Meanwhile, there's a hint of a decline in the number of patients in Intensive Care in Stockholm, as seen here, although it's a still a bit early to tell: https://www.svt.se/datajournalistik/corona-i-intensivvarden/

Meanwhile, there is reason to believe that Sweden is better than other countries at attributing the cause of death correctly: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

There's zero evidence of that. At this time, officially less than .5% of the population has been infected, so you'd have to postulate something like 99% of cases being asymptomatic.

> Their daily new case count has been mostly plateaued for weeks

Case count depends a lot on amount of testing (In which Sweden lags behind even the US) and testing criteria. Their death count does not look great.

They aren't claiming that the number of confirmed cases is that number of people who have or have had the virus, which is something they've pointed out in several of the press conferences, it's just the number of confirmed cases.

The difference you're seeing is the difference in conditions under which people get tested.

That's the main reason why most of them are out and about, enjoying the spring weather after a long and dark winter.

Once this virus starts affecting people you know, that's when folks will start to react.

Me personally I haven't heard of a single case until last week when I heard that one of my co-workers had it, along with his wife. They had it, and overcame it. But they live in another city and we had already started working from home at that point. So I never saw him other than on Teams.

This of course is unsurprising. Even random street violence drops during winter, as cold temperatures drives everyone inside and away from each other.

It should be noted that this is just the capital, which currently has something like 10x infection compared to most other areas of Sweden, and almost 20x the number of dead. To give some number, Stockholm has in the latest report 7k infected and 1200 dead. Malmö (or rather the region around it), which is Sweden third largest city, has 600 infected and 60 dead. Population wise, Stockholm has about 2x compared to Malmö.

People are not sure why stockholm has the number it has compared to other regions.

Lots of "Why in this country is?" "This place is doing well because."

And then a few weeks later the data shows that's simply not the case and you realize the concussions in those articles had little to zero data supporting it.

Personally I look forward to hearing about good data years from now about this pandemic.

I haven't heard a single swedish person utter this nonsense IRL. Sounds like a clickbait headline from Vice or something similar.

Where exactly does this come from? Sweden has no need to save face. We've been transparent and had open discussion from the beginning with the spoken assumption that we may, in fact, not be doing the right thing and that we may have to alter course as the situation changes.

The ones who need to save face are the ones which are committing to full lockdown right now. They're the ones who are making a big sacrifice and need to motivate it with the fact that "it's a necessity", seeing Sweden succeed otherwise would be a big blow to their egos and their personal sacrifices.

I will also say that voluntary compliance is still occurring here, which is notable both in what private companies are doing in adapting to the situation, and how the average person has changed their behaviour. This doesn't mean 100% compliance for everyone, which is unfortunate.